I don’t get why people on Lemmy care so much about either of them so passionately, I passively see more Linux vs Windows in a week here than basically the rest of my life before joining this site. Is every other person here some kind of computer science enthusiast or something like that?

I’m speaking to radiation since that’s my interest. The specific activity of uranium is generally around 14.8 Bq/mg vs. 25.4 Bq/mg for natural uranium, where one Bq is one nuclear transformation per second. That sounds like a lot but as far as radioactive materials goes is incredibly low. The Americium-241 used in smoke detectors for instance has 127 million Bq/mg.

Incorrect, if anything, understated - but because it’s a bunch of brown people and nobody cares enough to read the research

As I said before there certainly are health impacts but they are largely arising from the chemical toxicity, not the radiological activity. It is ONLY the radiological aspect where I said the risk was overstated, I recognize that the chemical one is very real. For example, the WHO 2001 report on depleted uranium that your second source cites gave a limit on depleted uranium of 0.28 mg/L in drinking water for its radiological toxicity… and a 140x smaller (!) provisional guideline of 0.002 mg/L for the chemical toxicity.

Your third source states this in its summary:

In this report, it is concluded that the radiation doses from DU do not pose a radiological hazard to the population at the four studied locations in southern Iraq. The estimated annual committed effective radiation doses that could arise from exposure to DU residues are low, always less than 100 µSv/a and only to a few, if any, individuals, and therefore of little radiological concern. The estimated radiation doses are less than those received on average by individuals from natural sources of radiation in the environment (worldwide average 2.4 mSv/a), below internationally recommended dose limits for members of the public (1 mSv/a) and below the action level of 10 mSv/a set out in the IAEA Safety Standard on Remediationof Areas Contaminated by Past Activities and Accidents [1] to establish whether remedial actions are necessary.

U-238 (the most common isotope in natural uranium, present to an even higher degree in depeleted uranium which has had the shorter-lived U-235 removed) has a half life in the billions of years and with such a long half-life life even with a large mass of the material you won’t be getting many radiological decays occurring. Which is not to say it’s good for you to ingest or contact, it’s definitely not, but that’s more due to the chemical properties it has as a heavy metal (think like how lead is bad for you) than its radiological ones.

Fission products formed in a nuclear reactor on the other hand have half lives all over the place from tiny fractions of a second to days, years, millions of years and so on. So you can get a high dose from short-lived isotopes going through many decays if you happen to be around them while they’re freshly generated, and intermediate life isotopes can persist in the environment for sustained periods while still dosing up the area. So a flying nuclear reactor venting its exhaust over you is quite a lot worse radiologically speaking than some depleted uranium being in your environment, though that said the chemical properties of having uranium in your drinking water or the physical properties of a high density round shot at you are plenty bad regardless of the radiological harm being often overstated.

Got to hand it to them that their diplomatic block seems to be developing nicely.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar are all working increasingly closer with each other, plus supporting dependents in common like the recognized governments of Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. While most of those outside of Pakistan and Sudan really REALLY don’t have any love for Iran, by positioning as peacemakers they raise their estimation in the world and also shunt more of the Iranian block’s ire towards the other emerging regional block (India, UAE, Israel, Ethiopia and their dependents such as Somaliland in Somalia, RSF in Sudan, Hijri’s National Guard in Syria etc.). Indeed, the UAE was far more heavily bombed by Iran than Qatar or Saudi Arabia even though they all remain at odds with Iran. If by chance it works then that’s economically great for Iran’s neighbors and the nations that export oil by the Gulf. At present it’s not working but that may also yield a dividend if it drives a wedge between Trump and Israel; we’ve already seen J.D. Vance broach the topic by warning Israel to side with Trump and not complain about the deal.

It’s common for a lot of authoritarian places to have laws that are selectively enforced. Since the enforcement is rare many people don’t bother following them but if someone bothers someone high up for any reason then breaking the law (that tons of other people break all the time anyway) is an easy excuse for the authorities to come down like a sack of bricks with a pretext ready. Being higher profile makes it more likely that you catch the eye of someone who hates you so it can be safer being some random person too low to notice instead. Though higher profile people also have more people ready to defend them generally so if you do get on someone’s list it’s better to have people in your corner who will make noise and maybe get punishment lessened or called off.

A couple of days ago the UK seized a shadow fleet tanker so I would assume that’s the reason for Russia to launch this provocation.

Don’t think this will rattle the UK at all when they could very easily delete this ship, but maybe it’s more of a warning to smaller countries without as robust of a navy to try to dissuade them from doing anything against the shadow fleet?

Edit: BBC says that it’s thought unrelated to the seizing. Says that the Russians were doing this shooting and sounding an alarm to tell the yacht to get out of its way while it was drifting towards them in foggy conditions. Also says that this was not in the UK’s territorial waters although it was near them and give a marker on the map.

Darn I was always kind of interested in looking at the Snapchat stories in random places in Afghanistan

I checked another article that says it’s thought not to be related and linked it above, also indicating that it was not in territorial waters.

Anyway, say it did happen in territorial waters, they would still have to make that determination of whether the cost is worth the benefit. It definitely sends a message to your people, partners and enemies that you’re taking your defense seriously which has benefits of its own, but escalation can also unsettle investors who may view the country as less safe than it was before which can ding the economy and stock market. Plus Russia would likely seek revenge through whatever non-military means it has available which may or may not hurt badly depending on how deep their bag of tricks goes for the situation in question.

For example, years ago Turkey famously blew up a Russian jet that intruded upon their territory, a pretty strong declaration of sovereignty. Since Turkey has a lot of economic ties with its Black Sea neighbor Russia, Russia was able to use those ties as leverage to inflict quite a lot of economic damage on Turkey in retaliation along with laying on diplomatic pressure. At the time many of Turkey’s partners were not happy with Turkey and more interested in smoothing over things with Russia so they provided Turkey little support, and Russia continued incursions in Turkish airspace. Since Turkey was kind of isolated anyway and ailing with those pains and tensions, they took a more Russia-accomodating policy to ease those burdens such as re-allowing Russian planes to fly over to Syria (until 2022 when the ban was reinstated) and doing the infamous S-400 deal. At the time Turkey probably regretted blowing up the plane for the headaches it brought on, although now many of the other countries in the area would probably look more favorably on what Turkey did than they did at the time.

So, whether it’s a good call to take the shot or not can depend on many things like if your neighborhood would back you up, what ties would the power making an incursion have that could be leveraged against you, are you in a sensitive political situation at home that may be aggravated with a worse economy or bolstered by looking strong against incursion, etc.

They would be expensive to raise by yourself as a food animal, but many people are more than happy to feed outdoor cats all on their own. Plus they do scavenging in the trash and are very efficient hunters of local animals like songbirds and frogs. So though it would take money to raise and fatten them yourself, it’s cheap as free to just yoink them off the street if you don’t get caught since others have done that work for you. Many people are accustomed to letting their cats go around unsupervised outside (even though outdoor cats have a third of the lifespan on average as an indoor cat) so that’s more opportunity to nab them without being contested.

I picked the Turkey example because it’s a relatively rare example of a country deciding to blow up a manned vehicle, along with the attending raft of consequences that probably shows why fewer countries opt for that course of action. But there have actually been a lot of incursions of jets and spy ships and such things into many NATO countries both before and after the war, to say nothing of drones. The drones are usually blown up because no one really cares that much since they don’t carry a live person. Manned incursions are often solved peacefully because the incentives usually fall on the politicians to not rock the boat and keep the status quo, but maybe with a diplomatic protest or more aid sent against a foe of that country.

Driscoll was born in Ireland but living in Croydon, Surrey with her husband and children at the time of her death. She had planned a three-day trip to London to attend a League of the Cross festival. She was in the company of her teenage daughter May and her friend Elizabeth Murphy and was crossing Dolphin Terrace in the grounds of the Crystal Palace in London when she was struck by the driver of a car belonging to the Anglo-French Motor Carriage Company that was being used to give demonstration rides. One witness described the car as being driven at "a reckless pace, in fact, like a fire engine".

Although the car's maximum speed was 8 miles per hour (13 km/h), it had been limited deliberately to 4 miles per hour (6.4 km/h), the speed at which the driver, Arthur James Edsall of Upper Norwood, claimed to have been travelling. His passenger, Alice Standing of Forest Hill, alleged he modified the engine to allow the car to go faster, but another taxicab driver examined the car and said it was incapable of exceeding 4.5 miles per hour (7.2 km/h) because of a low-speed engine belt. The collision happened just a few weeks after a new act of parliament had increased the speed limit for cars to 14 miles per hour (23 km/h), from 2 miles per hour in towns and 4 miles per hour in the countryside.

It’s interesting how cultural speed expectations are. So back in 1896 a car going 4.5 miles per hour was really booking it - and I have no doubt it probably was a poor judgenent to reach such speeds considering the poor state of the roads with ample pedestrians and horse carriages going everywhere, lack of rules and training and because the roads were not at all optimized for car travel. But now that ‘reckless’ pace would get you causing an accident for the opposite reason.

Enforcement surely plays a part, too. If you know the speed limit and that you’ll be busted for sure for going a hair over in a particular stretch, then you’ll probably be on your best behavior. If it’s literally never enforced such that everyone is accustomed to going as fast as seems prudent to themselves, though…

Definitely not the Jewish people in their own country at least but some strains of the far right have good relationships with Israel nevertheless. For instance Orban worked quite closely with Netanyahu and was called a friend of Israel despite at home doing stuff like praising WW2 figures who made antisemitic laws or promoting Soros conspiracy theories.

If antisemitism grows in countries with decently large Jewish populations, that encourages them to flee to Israel where they constitute a majority. Since over half of the Jewish people in the world don’t live in Israel, such migrations could make Israel much more powerful militarily and economically than it is today, so Israel the state could be better off in a more antisemetic world that is harder on the Jewish people. It would incentivize more settlers due to lack of housing and reduce the Arab proportion of the population, furthering goals of the Israeli right. At the same time, the right wing in the countries the Jewish people would be fleeing from would be happy to reduce the numbers of people with a different culture nearby. And they can cooperate on other things they may find of interest too like how Hungary and Israel got some military and Pegasus spyware deals, diplomatic cover, etc.

Mass internment fan?

I was curious and looked up adult women literacy rates for women in Iraq and this shows 64% literacy rate for women with 15+ years age in 2000 and 78% in 2021 for the same category. For female youths aged 15-24 it rose from 80% to 91% over the same time period (though in the intervening period that did indeed drop to 72-73% in their stats during the chaos of the Iraq War).

I’d say good riddance but who knows what sort of creep they’ll put in there. That said, this lives in my brain whenever I hear her name, as does that they had to cover Caesar’s face so she wouldn’t leak his identity:

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.

“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”

The like one good idea she had is that she opposed war with Iran but her voice clearly lost out against the likes of Bibi and Lindsey Graham.

Let’s be real, the regular Olympics are already doped. Their entire careers are on the line with the pride (and eyes) of the nation bearing down on them and demanding results… and we think they and their teams aren’t taking every edge they think they can possibly get away with? All the time famous athletes of yesteryear are being revealed to have been up to shenanigans when science catches up to retest their samples more effectively or some investigation gets a co-conspirator to spill the beans.

There’s microdosing below what tests can detect, novel designer drugs that can’t yet be detected, therapeutic use exemptions for drugs that would normally be banned, setting up situations to evade tests unless you are prepared to take them, tampering with the sample, good old fashioned corruption… probably tons of things that would never occur to me but that would to highly motivated teams with vast amounts of money on the line.

Idk for other ships but their aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov became a meme for always being down for maintenance and/or on fire

All these reports beg the question… have they found a country that ISN’T carrying out covert schemes in Canada?

When I was a kid I thought “talkie” was such a ridiculous, funny-sounding word for the advent of films with sound. It was only years later that I realized that the word “movie” which I had never thought twice about was almost the exact same thought process for, you know, pictures that moved.

That would cut too far into the palaces and marble boat fund